


Hoarder

by R_Gunns



Category: Suits (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hoarding, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Obsessive-Compulsive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-03
Updated: 2012-10-03
Packaged: 2017-11-15 13:40:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/527908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/R_Gunns/pseuds/R_Gunns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He never decides to start collecting newspapers; never consciously thinks about tap tap tapping his fingers on corners before turning the pages, never really notices he skips every page that ends in five (5 is a bad number, the day his parents died, the hours it took for the fire brigade to get him free from the car).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hoarder

**Author's Note:**

> I've only written a little of this story and I'm unsure whether I'll continue it, but I was watching that documentary Hoarders and this idea popped into my mind.

It happens after the car crash, maybe a couple of weeks after his parent’s funeral. Mike is nine. He never decides to start collecting newspapers; never consciously thinks about tap tap tapping his fingers on corners before turning the pages, never really notices he skips every page that ends in five (5 is a bad number, the day his parents died, the hours it took for the fire brigade to get him free from the car). It’s only when one day he comes back from school to find that the newspapers are _gone_ that he realises the depth of his problem.

When he finds the newspapers missing he searches his room first, looking under the bed and in his cupboard before searching through the lounge and the bathroom, and then in the trash under the stairs and then the cans outside until Grammy gets home from work and sees him surrounded by trash and on the verge of a panic attack (he’d been prone to those, after his parents had died) and immediately drops her shopping bags and milk spills everywhere and Mike _can’t breathe._

Later they are both sitting curled up on the sofa watching a documentary on birds and Grammy takes his small hand in her own and says,

“What were you looking for Mike?” and Mike can’t lie to her so he tells her and she frowns but doesn’t say anything.

The next day there’s a newspaper folded next to his breakfast, and when two weeks later there is more than a dozen newspapers next to his bed she still doesn’t say anything. Then a month goes by, and another, and suddenly there isn’t much room to walk around in his bedroom and the piles start to spill out into the hallway. This is when Grammy asks him one Sunday if he was going to throw them out.

An hour later, after soothing Mike through a severe panic attack that had him on the verge of passing out, Grammy is on the phone to the doctors asking for a referral to a psychiatrist.

*

It gets better. The psychiatrist helps him through the worst of it, and the pills help too. He still taps paper three times before turning it, he hop-skips every fifth crack on the pavement and lights flash once- twice before they are okay to stay on. But he doesn’t buy newspapers and he doesn’t read every word inside from cover to cover, and he doesn’t live with piles of them surrounding him all the time.

It’s okay mostly. He’s had a couple of relapses in the past, like the one time someone spiked his weed and he had a flashback that led to a week of hoarding, followed by two weeks of therapy. The other time was after he found out Grammy had to be put into care, and he’d spent a month hoarding till Trevor found out and sent him to therapy again (and also gave him stronger weed, which helped) and cleared out his bedroom for him. Apart from that he’s been mostly okay- even when he started working at Pearson Hardman, when he cut off contact with Trevor, during the mock trial, he’d been fine and he’d coped.

But then.


End file.
